Brewster Kahle is the engineering genius behind the Internet Archive, which is kind of like the NSA for the public Web… Kahle estimates that a space of that size could hold 10,000 racks of servers (assuming each rack takes up 10 square feet). “One of these racks cost about $100,000,” says Kahle. “So we are talking $1 billion in machines.”

… If Kahle’s estimations and assumptions are correct, the facility could hold up to 12,000 petabytes, or 12 exabytes – which is a lot of information(!) – but is not of the scale previously reported.

The data center’s capacity as calculated by Kahle would only allow the NSA to create Beyonce-style archives for the 13 million people living in the Los Angeles metro area.

Foremski's Take: Clearly, the NSA is targeting Hollywood and surrounding areas, which host large Gay and Iranian populations. As a byproduct, the NSA will have be able to boast having the best library of high def digital movies.